Research Discovery: Humans and Flies Share Sweet Preference

Posted: March 31, 2008

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Since substances will only taste sweet if they are able to bind to and activate a receptor, these two different types of sweet receptors must have similar ‘binding regions’ that fit the same range of molecular shapes.

Future work will be directed towards modeling how these two structurally different sweet receptors could have highly overlapping sweetener affinities. Such knowledge will increase understanding of how molecules bind to GPCRs, which are targets for many pharmaceutical drugs.